Christian-Pierre La Marca

French cellist Christian-Pierre La Marca was a fixture on the international concert and chamber music scenes even before signing to the Sony Classical label. He has cultivated expertise in both orchestral and chamber music, and in mainstream repertory and historical performance. La Marca was born in Nice in 1983. He took cello lessons in Aix-en-Provence and then moved to Paris. His teachers have largely been private ones: Jean-Marie Gamard and Philippe Muller in Paris, Frans Helmerson in Cologne, and Steven Isserlis in London, augmented by master classes with such figures as Mstislav Rostropovich and Heinrich Schiff. La Marca also received encouragement and mentorship from Itzhak Perlman, Seiji Ozawa, Maria-João Pires, and others. Their intuition and support bore fruit as La Marca began to make appearances at many of the world's top concert halls, including the Louvre and the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, Southbank Centre in London, the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Philharmonie in Berlin, the Alte Oper in Frankfurt, the Mariinsky Concert Hall in St. Petersburg, the 92nd Street Y in New York, and several halls in Japan and Australia. Major orchestras with which he has appeared as soloist include the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Orchestre National de France, the Brussels Philharmonic, and the early-music Sinfonia Varsovia in Poland and Il Giardino Armonico. As a co-founder and member of Trio Dalí, he has championed the music of contemporary composers such as Peteris Vasks and György Kurtág. Cultivating an unusual Bohemian image, La Marca was signed to Sony Classical and released L'heure exquise, a recital of French songs arranged for cello and piano, with pianist Amandine Savary in 2011. Several more Sony albums followed, and in 2018 La Marca and pianist Lise de la Salle issued the recital Paris-Moscou. La Marca plays a Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume cello from 1856 with an 1825 Jacob Eury bow. ~ James Manheim